Eighty-Nine: Alice

She stared resolutely ahead on the bus, but was keenly tuned in to the conversations being held around her.  They were all about her.  They usually were.  Who was following her this time?  Was it the old woman two rows back with the shopping bags clutched in her gnarly hands?  They could be prosthetic hands, a wig of wild, rodent-colored hair.  Or maybe it was the two college boys in front of her.  One kept glancing over his shoulder as though he was expecting her to say something.  Of course they weren’t real college boys.  Just because they wore matching sweatshirts with great yellow Ys on the front did not mean they attended that fine institution.  They certainly didn’t act like esteemed Yalies.

The bus driver continually glanced into the large, long mirror above her head, each time pinning Alice with a quick stare as if to constantly apprise her location.  Alice would fool that one by slipping out the back exit as soon as the college boys stood up.  She decided in that instant she would get off when they did, but she wouldn’t move until they had risen.  If she got up first and then they, that would only prove they were following her.

Alice sometimes tired of all these complications in her life.  When she was being tracked she was always late for work, and her supervisor was less than sympathetic.  Actually, he thought she was nuts.  He said as much.  Of course, that was probably to remove himself from her suspicions.  She had seen him on the phone, making reports about her to Them, the group that watched her, kept themselves informed about her.

She wondered why.  She was not so special or particular.  Still, there must be something about her that intrigued them.  Why else send all these spies after her?  One had accosted her in the elevator of her apartment once, before she moved to a secured building.  She had promptly thrown down her overcoat and torn open her dress, shouting, “See, I have nothing!  Nothing!”  The man had apparently been unnerved by her awareness of his true identity, for he hit the emergency stop and ran away as soon as the doors opened.

She tensed as the bus slowed near the curb.  Yes, they were rising, and deliberately avoiding any look in her direction.  She scurried off the rear deck and ran around the back of a delivery truck before glancing back at the boys.  They were walking away–but one of them was talking on his phone!  She was still in danger.  Quickly she scanned the sidewalk, the chairs of the cafe, the newspaper stand.  Who was watching her?  Who would pick up her trail to work?  Somewhere, she knew, they were waiting.  Watching.

Fifty-Seven: Samantha

She sat in the big Jewish diner at lunchtime, sipping tea.  No one actually saw her arrive; the waitresses all assumed she had been lingering since breakfast.  The owner for some inexplicable reason was reluctant to ask her to leave.  She was not bothering anyone as she sat there with her open notebook, occasionally marking something on the page.  Her handwriting seemed to be unusual, either very small or perhaps in a foreign language.  The waitresses could not quite figure out what was written on the page.

Sometimes Samantha would cock her head to the side, as though an odd idea had just occurred to her.  This would last anywhere from a few seconds to many minutes, and then she would write again in her book.  Sometimes she looked directly at the other patrons, who did not seem to notice this peculiar activity at all.  They avoided the table as though it wasn’t even there.

The strangest thing of all, what took the waitresses over an hour to realize because of all the bustle, was that Samantha’s cup never ran dry.  She continuously drank from it, small elegant sips, yet the liquid remained steady and steaming in her cup.  This was a mystery they could not solve.  Finally one determined girl, street-rough and fight-ready, directly approached the table.

“Hey, lady?” she said.

Samantha looked up and lightly grasped the waitress’ wrist.  Her touch was a cool, gentle breeze against the girl’s work-heated skin.  Samantha’s eyes, green as sea glass tumbled from the tropics, locked onto hers.  There was such amusement in their depths that the waitress unconsciously began to grin.

“It’s alright,” Samantha said.  “I’ll ask him about your father.  Don’t worry.”

“Thank you,” the girl said.

When she returned to the register where the other five waitresses were clustered, they all began asking at once what had been talked about, what had been said, but the girl could not precisely explain.  She was still smiling over whatever had been shared, and was uncharacteristically happy.  When they glanced back at the table, Samantha was gone, her teacup empty.  A gold coin rested against the rim of the saucer.

Fifty-Three: Molly

Molly had a habit of staring, which people quite often found very rude and frequently told her so.  It wasn’t that she was rude, she just had a curious preoccupation with the thoughts going round in her head.  Every so often they became so fascinating that the rest of Molly just kind of checked out for awhile.

It didn’t matter where she was, the grocery, the post office, in line at the bank.  Someone finally asked her one day if she had epilepsy, and this unnerved her terribly.  She made an appointment to see her doctor immediately, and was relieved when he laughed in her face.  No, it was quite doubtful that she had epilepsy.  He had known her from a child, and nothing had ever indicated such a condition.  What was the problem?

Molly began to describe the indescribable:  how blue skies opened before her when she stopped to admire a fluffy cloud and that she could see all the way to the Crab Nebula; how watching a car drive by caused her to trace all ten thousand miles of possible roadway going in that direction and what she might see if she took it; that a baby’s cry made her think of all the babies around the world who cried because their bellies were empty and their mothers were dead; that the certain notes played by the church bell downtown at noon recalled to her the whisper of God that she had once heard long before she was born.

The doctor listened intently to these and other intimate notions she shared with him, and when she ran out of breath he was weeping gently.  He took her hands and kissed her knuckles, then made her promise to take special care of herself on the way home.  He assured her once again that nothing at all was wrong with her.

Thirty-Four: Charles

He was rather… unconventional.  He retrieved his daily paper in his bathrobe.  He particularly embraced windy mornings if his neighbor was about.  Mrs. Durbish was a moralistic prude who deserved the occasional graphic rebuke.  He found it much more satisfying than having to talk to her.

As a lecturer he frequently scared his students with stories of failure and damnation, though professed to not give a crap whether they showed up in his classes or not.  Their work was assumed satisfactory if it were turned in on time and formatted properly.  Those who made that much effort found a fair assessment was their trade-off.  Most slunk away before the final add/drop day passed.

He married a wife who was haughty, cold.  They lived physically apart now, he in Wisconsin, she in Pennsylvania, where they had met and resided during his heyday as a teacher, proselytizing as many of his own views as the masters, and was nearly revered as such.  Only after a few trying episodes did the administration regretfully suggest he ease up on his classes, regard publishing as a more lucrative outlet for his notions than teaching.  His tenure protected him somewhat, but the climate in his classrooms was changing, and he was aware of it.  At least he could never be found guilty for shagging the freshmen.

But now he was getting old, slovenly.  He no longer cared to hold himself to others’ standards.  He shaved if he felt like it, bathed if he wanted to, and if that was not keen enough for them all, so be it.  He was glad the local market delivered groceries; it saved him that much more time in their scrutinizing gaze.  He would work on his books and await the day of his vindication as someone important.  The tall grass of his lawn obscured the basement window, where he recorded his groundbreaking thoughts.

Twenty-Three: Carmelita

Carmelita dyes her hair the color of the Vegas sunset.  She wears garish tops with why bother necklines matched with frilly, layered skirts.  She will tell you she is a chihuahua dropped off on the side of I-10, destined to mourn her true familia because they are lost to time and circumstance.  She will let you be her father, brother, cousin:  for a fee.

For a fee Carmelita will invite you to the altar that is her body.  She will wrap her legs around you and sing until you cry for mercy.  She will pound on you for hours until you swear belief in God; and you will tell the truth.  She will roll a joint the size of  an hombre’s middle finger, then ask you in a whisper if she “done okay.”

Carmelita keeps a statue of the Virgin, taller than the tv, on the nightstand in the room.  She covers it up when guests come by, her brothers and fathers and uncles.  She recreates her life on her knees when they’ve gone, confessing all and asking for another chance, another day, another try to find the path she should be on.  After showering she calls up her girlfriends and chats while she paints her nails Cowboy Purple.  At two AM she heads up to Paradise Road where she knows the ones who need her help will be waiting.  She is a missionary, bringing the grace of God and good sex to her people.  Mary understands.

Nineteen: Peter

“I have a plan!” he shouted at 2:30 in the morning.  His startled cat slunk back down into the basement, trailing cobwebs and dust from her tail.  Peter’s plan was startling in its brilliant, full-formed complexity.  One minute he was sound asleep, the next he was standing atop his bed, knees quivering, eyes bright with inspiration.

His plan took mere minutes to write down, even counting the time it took him to find a working pen.  Paper was quicker than waiting for the computer, although sometimes he acknowledged it was more difficult to read his nocturnal emissions when hand-written.  It went something like this:

“Dear Editor,  It has come to my attention that we are in the midst of a severe creativity shortage.  All of America is stumbling around blind, either waiting to lose their houses, their jobs, or their cars.  I have a plan (he wished he could somehow transcribe that jubilant trumpet clarion that sounded in his head when he said that)  to increase employment 100% in the next twelve months.  All this will take is a dedicated, concerted effort put forth by the American people who realize we are united by land, by government, and by purpose.  If one of our number falls, we must all work to pick him back up again.”

Peter’s missive went on for some minutes, but the gist of it was that all women over the age of 18 should cease working outside the home and confine themselves to domestic pursuits, including cooking, cleaning, gardening, and artistic craft.  In the wake of their mass exodus from the workforce, all men of suitable age, rank, and qualification would take their places, thus righting the unemployment statistics and establishing economic stability once again.  His plan had the added benefit of actually scheduling creative pursuits into the national schema.  He thought of the Puritans who had outlawed such things.  That’s where we started to go wrong, he decided.

Peter’s plan so consumed him that he copied his letter over five times, intending to send one each to the region’s most prestigious papers.  He could see the byline in his local news:  originally published in the Washington Post. Fancifully he shook an imaginary Obama’s hand, accepted congratulations from Mary Schapiro for figuring out an end to the —  oh, wait, that wouldn’t work.   Peter wondered if Mary’s husband was equally up to the challenge of guiding the country’s economic policy.  He wondered if she was even married.

Peter sat and pondered this dilemma well into the morning, recalling more and more women in positions of power who would need to be replaced by male counterparts.  Peter’s cat returned from its basement frolicking and crapped in the tub before curling up in her corner bed and going to sleep.  When the paper girl tossed the daily on his doorstep, Peter was in a state of nervous anxiety.  He flipped through the pages, every one of which seemed to feature some woman or other.  On the front page of the Features was a full page color photo of the Statue of Liberty, announcing the reopening of her grand crown to tourism.  Her head alone was expected to draw 5 million new visitors to New York City this summer.  Peter put his head down and cried.

Seventeen: Leslie

She sat on the hard metal stool and cried softly.  The black lab table refused to absorb her tears, but let them instead pool individually, until there was a united states of black orbs spread across the edge of the surface.  The cloying stench of formaldehyde grabbed at everyone’s nostrils and threatened to live there forever, but only Leslie succumbed to the desperate act of tears.

Before each student was a tray, cork-lined.  They could have been the size of cake pans.  Upon each bed of cork lay a frog, preserved for all eternity, or at least until the end of seventh period Wednesday, when this lab would be over and the manner of voyeuristic experiments along with it.  Leslie’s frog’s front paws were clasped together.  The thing had been gassed, or drowned, or clubbed, or however the fuck they killed it, in the middle of a prayer.

As the students all listened to the teacher discuss I-flaps and pinning and the need for slow and steady, Leslie gathered together all the fragments of their lives (hers and the frog’s), that had led them to this point.  Just as a mirror shattered on the drive still has the potential to reflect some crazy skewed version in a thousand different shards, Leslie imagined the myriad steps and threads that had led her and the frog-monk to meet at this space and time.

Her father had left her mother when Leslie was three.  They moved to an apartment in Dallas instead of staying in Austin in the white house.  Leslie’s cat had once caught a frog there.  It could have been a relative.  Did they raise these frogs in a lab for kids to cut up?  They were all in a bucket marked “Laboratory Study”.  She could never work in a place like that, knowing that every life she upheld was only to bring it to its unavoidable death.

In a flash of intuition, Leslie knew what it was like to be God.  She gasped.  The teacher looked at her sharply.  Every couple of years a kid really wigged out during this lab and had to sit it out.  His hand reached toward the papers Leslie would need to complete the work sans corpse.  When she looked up and met his gaze, he thought for a second there was an irridescent glow surrounding her.

She picked up the tray and walked to the front of the room.  “I can’t cut open this frog,” she said reasonably.  “He was a priest.  May I have another?”

As the sax player in front snickered, the teacher pointed toward the white bucket on the floor.  Leslie gently laid her frog to one side of the teacher’s table, took another frog from the yellowish juice, and calmly went back to her table to work.  The teacher looked at Leslie’s frog, with its two paws frozen against its chest, and felt uncomfortably like he was spying on a private moment.

Fourteen: Julian

Julian swirled a finger in his  merlot and brought it to his lips, catching the drop on his tongue.  The woman at the next table glanced down and flushed.  Julian smiled.  His companion for the evening, a young lady of quiet habits and discrete terms, slid a bare toe up his pant leg.  Her hands were clasped demurely in her lap.  Two hours from now they would be bound to a post, the fingertips paling to blue while he bruised her hips with his punishing hold.  His finger returned to his drink, swam through it again, and christened her left breast with the next drop.  She gazed steadily at him.

Julian did not rise before three.  He did not find his bed at all many nights.  His tastes were obscure, aristocratic, peculiar.  His business dealings were inscrutable and very successful.  He vacationed in Bangkok, Aspen, Istanbul.  He was contemplating a week in Prague, but his pilot did not like negotiating with them.   Little matter; Osaka would suit as well.  He was growing bored with the atmosphere in the restaurant, and scanned over the patrons’ heads for the waiter.  He was attended to at once.  After a softly murmured directive, the waiter nodded and hastened to do as he was told.

Julian appeared perhaps forty-eight, perhaps seventy.  It was difficult to decide whether his features were European or Middle Eastern.  He could as easily hail from Morocco as Madrid.  He claimed no permanent address.  His secretaries, who revolved monthly, had a listing of numbers at which to contact him.  His associates were assured of his loyalty only while in his presence.  Were it not for his brilliance and prowess in the global market, he would lack any cohort.  Despite recent unsettling turns in several economies, Julian’s partners and clients retained their net worth.  He was that aware of each new caution, each new collapsing behemoth.  He navigated foreign markets with the finesse of a poling boatman in the muddy Amazonian delta, avoiding the gnashing pirhanna.

Julian’s waiter returned with a large tray and a small group of children.  The waiter deftly set the table with plates of couscous, flat bread and kabobs with indeterminable chunks of meat steaming upon slivers of bamboo.  Julian inspected none of the food, his eyes locked on the children.  More of the dining room’s patrons took an interest in this activity, as the children had apparently been gathered from the alley outside.  Julian looked at each in turn, noting who looked back, who seemed afraid, who trembled with each sound.  He decided to have the last girl join his table for dinner.  The waiter ushered the rest of the children outside, while Julian rose and pulled out the chair next to his female companion.

The little girl pulled herself up into the seat, her feet dangling in the air below the table.  His companion spread the white linen napkin in the girl’s shabby lap and stroked her hair like an exotic pet.  Julian sat, satisfied.  The three enjoyed the repast before them without speaking.  At its end, Julian nodded at his companion, who kissed the girl’s full lips.  The girl slid off the chair, bowed to Julian, and left the restaurant.

Five: Shadow

Darkness is the mother of the universe and sun.

Darkness comes on slippered feet,

feather light; shadow light.  Slips in past

open doorways, shuttered windows,

silent halls.  Darkness is inside of me.

Open my mouth and look inside, there it is.

Close my eyes and once again, there I see my deep dark friend.

Shadow walks beside me, constantly awake.  Crouches down

beneath my bed before I go to sleep.  In the winter,

slight and quiet.  Summer makes her bold.  Following me down

ways and wends, ever-slippery echo of my fulsome

frantic life.  Who has the better bargain, shadow friend

of mine?  Methinks your path runs truer, deeper,

holier than mine.

One: Random

Random lives in a little house outside of the city.  He drives his bicycle to work, carefully judging his exertion to neither break a sweat nor dawdle before the big hill that will carry him into the city proper.  He likes his job in the insurance company.  It is an important job, one that no one else is equally as qualified to do as he.  There are calls waiting for him when he arrives.  His cubicle is not personalized; that is unprofessional.  His only concession to individuality is the coffee cup the company gave him five years ago.  It has their logo on it.  Random feels that is sufficient to spruce up his burlap-covered domain.

The first call is from an hysterical woman claiming her child will die without his help.  Random’s heart swells with pride.  He is more powerful than Superman, more capable than any doctor to help this woman.  Scrolling through her profile, he shakes his head, clucks in disapproval.  She is not current.  There is nothing he can do.  The conversation is brief, typical, loud.  She has paid, she swears, she simply cannot prove it because she didn’t keep the receipt.  “You must keep copies of all personal records, especially payments,” he counsels.  He fastidiously keeps three separate files, in three locations, of all important paperwork.  He hangs up amidst her squalling outrage.

Random bikes home past the market.  He carefully chooses a salmon fillet for his meal, watches that the woman behind the glass case does not keep a thumb on the scale.  He douses the fish with lemon prior to grilling it and winces as a paper cut he didn’t know he had is bathed with acidity.  He sucks his finger, cooks his fish, and wonders if the check he put out in the post that morning was really on its way to its recipient.  After supper, he thinks, he will go online to check his account’s due date one more time.